Let’s face it, he’s not a very experienced developer, and he can’t be expected to understand advanced topics like, oh, keeping backups, especially since he spends so much time on his activism, which no doubt distracts him from real coding.

Good thing us feminists are here to help him out. It just so happens that we had a copy of some of the code that was deleted, so we’ve forked it under the terms of the GPL, and made it available at:

It’s a Mercurial repository, and you can either browse it over the web, or clone it using your favourite Mercurial client. I know distributed version control can be a bit daunting for newbie developers, but perhaps Mikee can find a friend to help him out with it.

But we didn’t just post his code as-is. We’ve improved it! As a Perl developer and veteran CPAN contributor, I was able to make a start at cleaning up the worst bits of his slots game, though I must admit that my work was slowed down by the urge to send almost every line of it to TheDailyWTF.

And we also improved his Crossfire maps, especially one set in Russia which we switched to Ponyland, where you help the Pony Liberation Army free Ponyland from the trolls. Everyone loves ponies, right?

We think you’ll especially enjoy the new textures we’ve added:

They might not improve playability, but from what we’ve heard, there wasn’t much playability to start with.

As Free Software developers, we honour the Four Software Freedoms, and gladly recognise Mikee’s right to run these programs, study and learn from them, redistribute copies, and even modify them — provided, of course, that attribution is given to the geekfeminism.org developers.

ETA: Comments on this post are now closed — yes, early — as we seem to have reached the point of nothing new being added to the discussion.

Good-oh! The more I read from (or heard about) MikeeUSA, the more I need to find a source of cheap bulk brain-bleach.

Also, a VERY good method of both pointing out his rather atrocious behaviour while keeping what source was evident in publication (hopefully cleansed of hate speech as well as in a better working state).

Out of curiosity, what was the actual violation of the SF.net TOS? I didn’t wade through the entire code base, but I saw http://code.geekfeminism.org/mikeeusa/rev/5559dbba769c which seems to be the only misogynist section that was removed. What was in the code that was extreme enough to warrant censorship? Personally, I’m a libertarian who doesn’t believe that any statement of opinion should be suppressed. (I agree with the ACLU’s stance in the Nazis vs Stokie and Jake Baker cases which are some of the most extreme cases of free speech.) I understand that SF.net is a private group and can censor whatever they want, I’m wondering where they draw the line.

S: I’m not sure, you’d have to ask Sourceforge to be honest. I suspect this code was only part of it. From what I’ve heard there was also another project which was more clearly harassing/discriminatory, but which SF couldn’t remove because it had multiple contributors and some of them had contributed innocuous code.

I’m curious to ask Sourceforge as well what violated their ToS. If I come across anything obvious I’ll highlight it in a comment here or a post. So far it’s mostly just “Down with women voting” which I doubt would be grounds for removing the code. Though it’s fun to turn it into sparkleponies.

If you go to the SourceForge TOS, check out section 3 “User Content”, “Posting”, “f”.

Your Content does not endorse or promote racism, bigotry, hatred, or physical harm of any kind against another group or individual, and does not discriminate, incite harassment or advocate harassment of any group or individual;

“Personally, I’m a libertarian who doesn’t believe that any statement of opinion should be suppressed. ”

[TRIGGERY HERE]

As an issue unrelated to the source code in question, what about death threats? Which he has in fact made, in other channels. Should those be protected? (Note: these are not “all women should be killed” death threats — these are “you should be killed”. The Skokie case was about abstract violence, not about actionable threats. )

I don’t consider his harassment of specific people to be protected speech. However, I wouldn’t support censoring his statements after the fact unless they had private information in them. That is, it would be OK to punish him for those statements or prevent him from making them in future (similar to all unprotected speech), but the actual statements should remain to show how much of a jackass he is.

It is not actually pleasant to work in environments where death threats against you or others are allowed to stand on the grounds that they demonstrate that the person doing the threatening is a jackass.

As Daedala says, an environment where the kinds of threats Mikee makes is hardly hospitable to outsiders. It depends on what we, as a community, want to have as an environment. That’s why I’m so disappointed to see the comfort of douchenozzles like Mikee placed above that of people who actually contribute.

As a libertarian do you agree that Sourcefourge has the right to control the content of its own websites and servers?

They graciously allow others to use space that they own and pay to maintain. As a libertarian do you agree that they can also refuse the right to share their property if they wish? The rules for being allowed to use Sourceforge space were clearly available and agreed to by Mikee.

Mikee is still able to speak and create software. Sourceforge offered him hospitality, but he was an ungracious guest and ignored reasonable requests for civil behavior. They kicked him off their land.

Sounds very libertarian to me.

Sourceforge is a private party not the government. Libertarianism gives maximum rights to private parties, including the right to control and ownership of their own property. It is a very Dickensian model of civil discourse with a lot of downside. Most libertarians ignore the downside and concentrate on the limiting government part.

This is not censorship. Mikee read and agreed to the property owner’s rules. He chose to ignore and break the rules.

Well, the US legal standard is a true threat. Absent the context, I doubt “you should be killed” would rise to that. If the context did lean to that — “you should be killed, and I’m the person to do it, and I know where you live,” I think one’s first act would be not to silence the threats, but to act on the imminent danger of violence, which might include contacting your local police.

You can either have a community where people who spew hate speech are welcome, or you can have a community where the people who are the targets of the hate speech are welcome. Not both. Making no decision to discriminate means that the assholes come to dominate the group. This is, I believe, noncontroversial when it comes to assholes getting in the way of OS design.

It’s a bit hard with the threading to tell what you’re talking about here, but if the two here is a reference to”one’s first act would be not to silence the threats, but to act on the imminent danger of violence”, then we’re speaking at crossed purposes — I’m describing what a “true threat” looks like and how it might differ from the quoted bit of MikeeUSA, not what SF.net should do with their servers, or how language like this affects a community. (The ambiguity is in the previous conversation).

I don’t think you need to reach to the legal definition of “unprotected speech” before you start throwing people out of your community.

Well, there’s also http://code.geekfeminism.org/mikeeusa/rev/a60684445ba5 which replaces text from the map-now-known-as-Ponyland. Also the commits that “fix attribution” touch various README.TXT and similar files which are not visible in the game, but did carry Mikee’s malevolent missives.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t like to see so much reformatting, spelling correction, and removal of WTF-but-still-working code without discussing it with upstream first, due to the problems such patches cause for future upstream merges; however, in this case any sort of upstream merging activity seems highly improbable on this project. ;)

(Note regarding context: my previous posts were only about his code on SF.net, but I guess the thread is now about his general postings at various other places.)

Daedala “Tacit acceptance is what hostile environments are made of.”

Leigh Honeywell “That’s why I’m so disappointed to see the comfort of douchenozzles like Mikee placed above that of people who actually contribute.”

Other than those who are openly misogynistic, is anyone actually supporting MikeeUSA’s views or defending them? I haven’t seen the various Linux mailing lists where he started his rants, but various searches on Google make it seem like everyone agrees that he is an asshole that should shut up.

In case I wasn’t being clear in my previous posts, I don’t support his views and I agree with everyone else here that he is an asshole that should be banned from the various forums where he is trolling. However, banning him is very different from retroactively censoring his comments or contributions. It is better leave his comments and speak out against them than to delete them. If all his posts were removed, then no one who was not already familiar with his trolling would understand what was so bad about his ideas. However, finding his excerpts on http://geekfeminism.org/2009/10/08/psa-mikeeusas-hate-speech-and-harassment/ and http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Mikeeusa (warning: the site is nfsw and would be considered offensive to most people).

Censuring someone’s views and censoring their comments are two orthogonal actions. MikeeUSA deserves the former (and almost everyone on the web agrees), but I’ve yet to see anything worthy of the latter in my opinion (though different people draw the line at different places for censoring).

“Other than those who are openly misogynistic, is anyone actually supporting MikeeUSA’s views or defending them?”

By saying that his comments should be allowed to stand, despite the fact that they are hate speech directed against people in the community, I would say that you are supporting and defending his comments.

You are saying that you want to keep hate speech, directed against people in the community, in the community environment, despite the fact that this creates a hostile, unwelcoming, and unsafe environment for those people and others like them.

You are saying that hate speech is more welcome in your community than the people who have stated that they find such speech hostile, unwelcoming, and unsafe.

Hateful words are not, in fact, more important than people. The first amendment does not protect hate speech, and does not apply to private communities. The idea that MikeeUSA’s words are more important than his victims is risible.

If you want to be your own apologist and fan club for his comments and posts, go right ahead. But don’t think that people are misunderstanding you when they point out you are, in fact, defending MikeeUSA and judge you accordingly.

I have known many internet libertarians who do not acutally feel the need to defend the eneffable rights of hate speech, particularly not on private sites, so I have no idea why you are setting up that straw man.

Internet libertarians should just love Google Sidewiki. It’s not quite clear whether comments attached to pages there will ever go away…assuming the S/N ratio is high enough that anyone ever bothers to read them.

S: I’m an ethics wonk and a free speech nut. And I draw the line when violence and death threats are made.

$pedantic_rant, with potentially upsetting words:

You want to tell people that $Killer was right in killing all the {women, jews, blacks, whites, etc.}? That’s your opinion. Have at.

You want to tell people that they should go out and injure/rape/murder/etc all the {group}s? Sorry, that’s across the line.

HOWEVER. Private sites have the right to make private rules. If a site like SourceForge has a rule against telling people that $Killer was right in killing all the {women, jews, blacks, whites, penguins, nuclear whales, etc.} then SourceForge has the right to remove people who violate the rule.

In other news, any programmer who doesn’t keep and backup a copy of his own code is worth laughing at, no matter what other insanities.

You have no idea how much trouble we had with MikeeUSA. Our site has one of the oldest Men’s Rights forums on the net (yes, I know, boo hiss, etc) and he was erm… asked to leave… after trying to start a “discussion” about how men “should be able to rape their 12-year-old wives”. The sad thing is that Mike could really be productive if he was able to find some way to put his demons to rest.

As far as I’m able to tell, he’s persona-non-grata just about everywhere that he’s been online now. His name even came up in a discussion on Slashdot recently. What saddens me though is that he is held up as an example of the “anti-female” sentiment in whatever community he appears in. No. Mikee is Mikee and he has his own one man war going on. Let’s leave it at that shall we?

Quite so. Mikee is really quite a sad character. He must live in constant fear, since he’s apparently terrified of half the human race (you don’t act this vile towards people you’re not terrified of: this is fear talking. And testosterone as well of course, but mostly fear).

(oh, and, adding my voice to the chorus: best punking in a long time. My Little Mikeee would surely dent his reputation if he had any left.)

i think it’s a great idea to take silly mike’s work and turn it into something beautiful with ponies. But: the latest versions of this map are meant to be played not in crossfire, but in nexuiz, which you can find here:

Here are some screenshots of “ponyrepublic” as it stands, so you can see what you have “done” already:

Nice work, keep it going! I also suggest giving the map a general pink tone, apart from changing the textures. One way is to use http://dev.alientrap.org/repositories/changes/nexuiz/misc/tools/bsptool.pl with the option -lpng -o to take the lighting information out of the .bsp file, then editing the extracted png files with GIMP or ImageMagick to give them a consistent pink tone, and adding them to the repository (and committing the now smaller BSP).

Oh the other hand, the whole thing where SourceForge was technically within their rights to take down MikeeUSA’s work for violating their Terms of Service, but Beth was a HORRIBLE EVIL PERSON for pointing out to them that the ToS were violated, is just bizarre. WTF?

I thought the line of reasoning about “enforcing a private contrast is RONG because …” was a bit lacking. Apparently the open source community has taken adverse possession of SourceForge’s servers and therefore it’s incorrect for a member of that community to say “Whoa, we seem to be violating the rules thereof?”

Honestly, this stunt seems like hypocrisy. I recently discovered this website, with the wiki and blog, and have found it an informative(although sometimes questionable) resource. I am trying to learn as much as I can about feminism and the issues raised to form a sound opinion, not built on assumptions or preconceptions.

Stunts like this….give a very bad impression. SO, the guys was saying stupid, horrible things. So what. action should have been taken, but trying to drive someone out of the FOSS community and then ripping of his code and openly mocking him is simply immature.

Yes, you are completely within your rights to redistribute his code and modify as you see fit, but when doing it only to mock the guy and rub it in, it seems in bad taste. Issues like this are trick, where a community openly despises and condemns one individual…never the less, the rule of law should prevail and be upheld, at least in spirit…

*Where people should be judged for their contributions and ability to code or document, or their contributions in a technical capacity. This time, they crossed over, but trying to drive him from the FOSS community is simply unwarranted.

This Mikee fellow has a long history of harassing, threatening, and otherwise actively trying to drive women out of FOSS. He’s AFAIK the only person banned from the Debian bugtracker, among dozens of other places online. We’re not the ones doing the driving out here.

Yup, we’re making fun of him. Feminists aren’t so humorless after all :)

Um, the guy was campaigning to take away women’s rights. That’s a bit different from laughing at someone because he’s too stupid to back up his code. BTW, nobody drove him out of the open-source community — he either failed to read, or read but ignored, the ToS of a service he was using. That’s what happens when you ignore your side of a contract (no bigotry) — the other party doesn’t have to hold up theirs (offering the service).

BTW, what I find more distasteful than people who make fun of bigots is people who defend bigots. This is a guy who thinks that men should be allowed to forcibly “marry” and rape 12-year-old girls, as that is a man’s natural right, and that women who try to stop him from doing so are subjugating him. This is a man who has repeatedly made death threats towards various women. Accepting in the open-source community means accepting that many women, some very talented, will feel threatened and unwelcome in the open-source community. If you seriously think that one untalented bigot is worth more than scores of talented women, then IDK what to tell you, man.

It’s not like he’s banished to the land of no Internets. He can post his code and his stuff wherever he likes. Maybe if he quits being creepy about threatening to massacre women and rape 12 year old girls, people will accept him.

Did you get the bit where we re-posted his code and stuff? That was to be overly generous and to give him plenty of chance to quit being a jerk. But I suggest you actually go read what he’s produced on the net.

What Mikee has done is illegal is most of the countries, if not all, that all the people who have posted live in.

Taking his code, which isn’t all that hot, cleaning it up, taking it apart and tearing out from underneath Mikee’s feet the “I’m such a great coder so therefore I know women are full of suck” plank that he so readily rides upon is the least that should happen.

For my part, I found this hilarious. It was quite a treat, being able to read through his “creative work” and see how, well, unimaginative and pedestrian it was. It read like the kind of bog-standard, cut-and-paste, brute force and ignorance stuff you get from unimaginative first year students who have no idea how to do things elegantly or efficiently, and also lack the curiosity to find out.

Add in the nonsensical ranting, the pointless insertion of misogyny into the documentation and even into the code, the terrible spelling errors, the obviously poor understanding of the language…be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that he got the boot for his virulent misogyny causing him to engage in illegal acts of harrassment and intimidation, you would be laughing too.

Me, I’m laughing my head off. And, because I despise the misogyny that infects much of the free software culture of which I am otherwise proud to be a member, I must say that my schaden is also freuding.

I didn’t mean to accuse the people of this particular blog in doing the driving out, but in many various comments I had read there was an attitude and tone where it was celebrated and advocated. Something I think is wrong.

Yes, what he was doing was wrong, but silencing people because you don’t like what they say is wrong in so many ways. I feel that’s what the action by SF amounted to.

Meg,

It should not matter what he was campaigning for. I don’t agree with what he was saying, at all, but I would support his right to say it. He hates women, and isn’t too well adjusted, and I don’t have a problem with people deleting comments from their personal blogs at all. Nor being banned from the debian mailing list, as his messages were inappropriate.

Please do not mistake me defending his right to be a bigot, as me defending his stance and what he states. I do not agree with his stance at all, but I felt the situation was handled in a poor way. I also never said anything about scores of women being worth less than a bigot, so I don’t know how you got to that conclusion.

As for violating a contract…that really is just nonsense. Each of the services he has been kicked out from, all big companies, basically have a clause equivalent to “we can ban you at any time for any reason just because we want to”. There are many hate blogs, and simply removing a blog due to succumbing to pressure from a community….well, I don’t agree with that.

Liz,

My point, was that he should not have had his code account removed, simply because someone on sf didn’t like his behavior on an unrelated site. Yes, what he did was very very wrong, and 99% of people will disprove of his actions…that still doesn’t mean he code should have been removed IMO.

—————

I’m not trying to be argumentative or stir the pot, but this is what I believe. I hate it when people feel that it is fine to take matters into their own hands, and everybody agrees because there is a mutual disapproval. I feel that is what has happened here. I feel that people should always be treated equally and fairly…in this case, that would mean banning him from mailing lists where appropriate, deleting comments of his blog, notifying his ISP etc. Not removing him from unrelated services.

I see this as being analogous to, say, an overly active skinnazi posting comments on peoples blogs, from many different races. Because the owner of one of the blogs happens to also be an admin at say, gmail, he deletes the skinnazis gmail account.

And then, takes some draft messages, edits them for comedic effect and reposts them.

I see this as being analogous to, say, an overly active skinnazi posting comments on peoples blogs, from many different races. Because the owner of one of the blogs happens to also be an admin at say, gmail, he deletes the skinnazis gmail account.

And then, takes some draft messages, edits them for comedic effect and reposts them.

Or have I got this all wrong?

Well, for one thing you seem to be missing the point that he released his code under a license that specifically allows and encourages modification and re-distribution.

Because the owner of one of the blogs happens to also be an admin at say, gmail, he deletes the skinnazis gmail account.

For another thing, neither Beth Lynn nor anyone here at GF is (to the best of my knowledge) an admin at SourceForge. The request for them to review the code against their terms of service was made through the same public channels that are available to everyone else. At a minimum, the code violates 3(f) of their Terms of Use.

Having freedom of speech doesn’t compel anyone else to publish your speech. If you loaned someone your car, and they started driving it like a reckless dumbass, you’d take your car the hell away from them. Same principle applies here.

I feel that people should always be treated equally and fairly…in this case, that would mean banning him from mailing lists where appropriate, deleting comments of his blog, notifying his ISP etc. Not removing him from unrelated services.

Or you know, maybe asking people to enforce their terms and conditions? Would that apply to your list here? Just saying, because that’s what happened.

Please do not mistake me defending his right to be a bigot, as me defending his stance and what he states. I do not agree with his stance at all, but I felt the situation was handled in a poor way. I also never said anything about scores of women being worth less than a bigot, so I don’t know how you got to that conclusion.

You think that everyone here hasn’t heard that argument a million times before. Rights interfere with each other. If you privilege one, you deny another one. By standing by someone’s right to spew hateful, violent speech at a group of people you are denying that group the right to not have to their lives interrupted by this speech. That’s why you’re valuing scores of women below a bigot because you’d rather have said bigot be able to tell a group of people that they would be better off dead then to have that group of people not have to hear that.

I beleive I addressed that in my previous comment. The behaviour you refer to happened on blogs did it not? He was not sending messages through SF was he(not including the content of his code, as that is not what I am referring to)?

Skud,

If you read my original comment, I noted that everything was in agreement with the license, but that did not make it right. IMO.

Rick,

I do apologise if I did not understand the situation. I read a blog post “not in my neighbourhood” which, to me, implied that the blog author had some power at SF. The neighbourhood being SF.

As I said earlier, the fact that anys ervice can kick any user for any reason does not make it right. I’m sure there a heap of offensive projects on SF, but SF is happy for them to stay there, unless enough noise is raised.

That is what happened in this case.., and unless SF was used as a conduit for his behaviour, then the account should have been left alone.

It’s not for you to decide whether or not the account should have stayed or not. SF are well within their rights to forbid certain behaviors via their terms of service, which they did, and which he engaged in nonetheless.

His freedom of speech is not curtailed; he can go elsewhere, find other hosting, run his own server if he so chooses. There are all sorts of places on the internet where such bigoted and odious speech is not only tolerated, but encouraged. He could voice his opinions there.

I find it very curious that bigots and hatemongers, when they finally face consequences for their actions, so often find “devils-advocate” defenders in the average man* on the internet, while people of marginalized groups, such as women, who try to speak out and find themselves attacked and harrassed, even sent death threats, until they are forced to close down their blogs for their own safety and sanity find no such defenders. Where were the stalwart champions of free expression when Kathy Sierra was forced off the net by a mob of misogynist trolls posting threatening messages?

I feel you are misrepresenting what I said, and the point I was trying to make. I never said or implied it was for me to decide if the account should stay or not. I simply stated that I thought the decision to remove the account was in bad taste, as his actions occurred on different services. If I insult you from a Gmail account, my Yahoo account should remain untouched, as an example.

I also think you were exaggerating what my point is. Once again, I feel I have to explain that I am not ‘siding’ with the guy, who I agree was a bigot. However, I don’t believe the action taken was a correct one.

Two wrongs do not make a right. I am not defending a bigot, but defending what I believe to be an import right, fairness and equitable treatment for all, and everyone accoutanble to the rule of law. In an ideal world.

No doubt he was deserving of some punishment. In that case, notify his ISP, since you have his information. Notify the admins of the services he is abusing etc.

There is/was no need to have his accounts on unrelated services shut down, simply because you don’t like the guy or approve of his content. However legal and permissible such actions are, they are still in bad taste. Of course, no where near as bad as what he did..

I won’t be replying again, as I would rather this not turn into an argument. Thankyou for the conversation thus far.